Interlude…playing with fire!

After returning from the photo shoot, I had just enough energy to put up the photos and collapse into bed. I slept twelve hours on Sunday and another eleven hours on Monday, and in between puttered around the house doing not much of anything. Exhaustion from working 40+ hours/week on the dress for almost two months, on top of a full-time job!

After all that effort, I felt rather burnt out on the dress, so I decided to take a short break from it and work on another project I’d been wanting to do: an entry for the Handwoven Not Just For Socks sock yarn challenge. This would be a collapse weave shawl, woven with stripes of elastic sock yarn alternating with “regular” sock yarn, producing ruffles. I planned to make the ruffles flame-colored, the flat areas black, and title the resulting piece “Lava Flow”.

Sock yarn, of course, is HUGE (at least by my standards), so this worked up very quickly. I wound the warp, beamed it on, threaded it, sleyed it, and wove the first set of samples in less than a day. And here they are:

Four samples for "Lava Flow"

Top left: gold metallic (the same gold metallic I used for the coat fabrics).

Top right: 2/28 black cashmere weft

Bottom right: variegated red-orange-yellow 30/2 silk

Bottom left: orange 30/2 silk.

I think the “winner” is the bottom right one, with the variegated flame-colored silk weft, because it reminds me of lava more than any of the others. It might be nice with one strand of 30/2 silk and one strand of metallic, but I’m not going to invest any more time in sampling – this isn’t a Major Project, just a sideline. When I get up tomorrow, if I still like the variegated weft yet, I’ll tie on and start weaving for the finished project.

My one regret is that I couldn’t make the stripes more irregular. Next time I’ll try beaming on as on a plain beam, which will let me do more randomizing. But, as previously noted, this is just a diversion, so I’m not going to work obsessively on perfecting it. I’ll weave it, photograph it for the contest, send it in, and forget about it.

Tomorrow: back to work on the dress! It’s been a refreshing interlude, but I’m itching to get some more sewing done!